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Authors: Christopher Buckley
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this, but smiled in a certain way. And it worked.
They were all splendid, moving, and brief. No one went beyond his or her allotted time—except for the Catholic padre (Pup
had insisted on him) who gave the opening benediction. It was brilliant, subtle, amusing, intellectually elegant, and seven
minutes long.
So it all went very well and was worthy of Pat Buckley. And it had taken a month to arrange. When on that May morning I walked
into the sunlit Temple of Dendur—a two-thousand-year-old Nubian temple to the goddess Isis, enclosed within a vast, stippled
glass atrium and reflecting pool—and saw the huge spray of pink apple blossoms, the chairs smartly lined up, my programs,
Tony’s $20,000 worth of TV screens and technical people, saw the dozens of Sean Driscoll’s smartly attired catering staff,
I took it all in and gave myself a little pat on the back and thought,
Yes, Mum would approve
.
Pup arrived as I was having this quiet little moment of self-congratulation. I winked at him and spread my arms as if to say,
So—whaddya think?
He looked about the room and grimaced. “It’s awfully
bright
, isn’t it?” He was used to seeing it at night, during Mum’s Costume Institute galas. I suppressed the urge to hurl him into
the reflecting pool. After it was over, I looked over and saw him lurching on unsteady legs to embrace Henry Kissinger. Poor
Pup, poor desolate man—his face was flushed, livid, scarlet with grief. This is the eulogy from the program that he couldn’t
bring himself to deliver a cappella in the shadow of the old Egyptian goddess:
By any standard, at near six feet tall, she was extraordinary. She shared a suite with my sister Trish and two other students
at Vassar, and on that spring evening in 1949 I was the blind date she had never met. When I walked into the drawing room
the four girls shared, I found her hard pressed. She was mostly ready for the prom but was now vexed by attendant responsibilities.
I offered to paint her fingernails, and she immediately extended her hand, using the other one on the telephone. The day before,
she had given the sad news to her roommates that she would not be returning to Vassar for junior and senior years. She was
needed at home, in Vancouver, to help her mother care for a dying family member. My own parents had gone to their place in
South Carolina for the winter and the house in Sharon, Connecticut, was closed. But I would dart over from Yale for an occasional
weekend in the huge empty house, and Trish brought her there once, and we laughed all weekend long, and Trish promised to
visit her in Vancouver during the summer.
I had a summer job in Calgary working for my father in the oil business, and from there happily flew over to Vancouver to
join Trish and Pat for a weekend. Her father’s vast house occupied an entire city block, but did not dampen our spirits. On
the contrary, the tempo of our congeniality heightened, and on the third day I asked if she would marry me. She rushed upstairs
to tell her mother, and I waited at the bottom of the huge staircase hoping to get the temper of her proud mother’s reaction
(her father was out of town), and soon I heard peals of laughter. I waited apprehensively for Pat to advise me what that was
all about. The laughter, she revealed, was generated by her mother’s taking the occasion to recall that eight times in the
past, Pat had reported her betrothal.
One year later, in the company of about a thousand guests, we exchanged vows. Two months after that, we rented a modest house
in the neighborhood of New Haven. Pat resolved to learn how to cook. Her taste was advanced and her ambitions exigent, so
she commuted to New York City and learned cooking from experts, becoming one herself. Meanwhile, I taught a class in Spanish
to undergraduates and wrote
God and Man at Yale.
Primarily to avoid exposure to further duty as an infantry officer, I joined the CIA and we
They were all splendid, moving, and brief. No one went beyond his or her allotted time—except for the Catholic padre (Pup
had insisted on him) who gave the opening benediction. It was brilliant, subtle, amusing, intellectually elegant, and seven
minutes long.
So it all went very well and was worthy of Pat Buckley. And it had taken a month to arrange. When on that May morning I walked
into the sunlit Temple of Dendur—a two-thousand-year-old Nubian temple to the goddess Isis, enclosed within a vast, stippled
glass atrium and reflecting pool—and saw the huge spray of pink apple blossoms, the chairs smartly lined up, my programs,
Tony’s $20,000 worth of TV screens and technical people, saw the dozens of Sean Driscoll’s smartly attired catering staff,
I took it all in and gave myself a little pat on the back and thought,
Yes, Mum would approve
.
Pup arrived as I was having this quiet little moment of self-congratulation. I winked at him and spread my arms as if to say,
So—whaddya think?
He looked about the room and grimaced. “It’s awfully
bright
, isn’t it?” He was used to seeing it at night, during Mum’s Costume Institute galas. I suppressed the urge to hurl him into
the reflecting pool. After it was over, I looked over and saw him lurching on unsteady legs to embrace Henry Kissinger. Poor
Pup, poor desolate man—his face was flushed, livid, scarlet with grief. This is the eulogy from the program that he couldn’t
bring himself to deliver a cappella in the shadow of the old Egyptian goddess:
By any standard, at near six feet tall, she was extraordinary. She shared a suite with my sister Trish and two other students
at Vassar, and on that spring evening in 1949 I was the blind date she had never met. When I walked into the drawing room
the four girls shared, I found her hard pressed. She was mostly ready for the prom but was now vexed by attendant responsibilities.
I offered to paint her fingernails, and she immediately extended her hand, using the other one on the telephone. The day before,
she had given the sad news to her roommates that she would not be returning to Vassar for junior and senior years. She was
needed at home, in Vancouver, to help her mother care for a dying family member. My own parents had gone to their place in
South Carolina for the winter and the house in Sharon, Connecticut, was closed. But I would dart over from Yale for an occasional
weekend in the huge empty house, and Trish brought her there once, and we laughed all weekend long, and Trish promised to
visit her in Vancouver during the summer.
I had a summer job in Calgary working for my father in the oil business, and from there happily flew over to Vancouver to
join Trish and Pat for a weekend. Her father’s vast house occupied an entire city block, but did not dampen our spirits. On
the contrary, the tempo of our congeniality heightened, and on the third day I asked if she would marry me. She rushed upstairs
to tell her mother, and I waited at the bottom of the huge staircase hoping to get the temper of her proud mother’s reaction
(her father was out of town), and soon I heard peals of laughter. I waited apprehensively for Pat to advise me what that was
all about. The laughter, she revealed, was generated by her mother’s taking the occasion to recall that eight times in the
past, Pat had reported her betrothal.
One year later, in the company of about a thousand guests, we exchanged vows. Two months after that, we rented a modest house
in the neighborhood of New Haven. Pat resolved to learn how to cook. Her taste was advanced and her ambitions exigent, so
she commuted to New York City and learned cooking from experts, becoming one herself. Meanwhile, I taught a class in Spanish
to undergraduates and wrote
God and Man at Yale.
Primarily to avoid exposure to further duty as an infantry officer, I joined the CIA and we
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